How to Ace your Christmas Advertising

We share best practices for developing Christmas ads that deliver the gift of emotional engagement

Christmas ads are big budget, a big deal and done right deliver a big boost to the bottom line, making the most magical time of year the most profitable too.

A great Christmas ad has an impact that echoes well beyond the festive season, though. Entertain and engage with audiences and you’ll deliver a positive long-term impact to brand growth.

So here’s a stocking-full of suggestions for ways to make a Christmas ad boost sales and build your brand at the same time, drawn from our years of experience testing Christmas ads and helping brands create some of the most iconic examples.

Best Practices for Heart-warming Ads

There are several strategies that brands can employ to create a successful advertisement, including:

Emotional storytelling

Treat your ad just as a short-term sales boost and you’re missing a chance for growth. Christmas is a time audiences are primed for positive emotion, and positive emotional storytelling drives long-term share gain. Get people engaged with strong characters, a sense of place and lots of communication. Emotional storytelling went on the back burner during the pandemic with comedy filling the gap. Now, we think a blend of story and humour is the right approach.

Kohls expertly uses implicit communication in its spot featuring a grandson who gifts his grandmother with a dance on Christmas.

Fluent devices

Creative consistency helps brands gain new customers and market share - your previous ads give your new ones an emotional head start. One way to achieve growth is by using a Fluent Device - a recurring character or scenario that lets people quickly identify your brand. Introduced in 2016, Aldi’s Kevin the Carrot is now a familiar character that fans enjoy seeing year after year. The supermarket’s 2020 Christmas ad featuring the beloved vegetable scored 5.8-Stars, making it an exceptional performer that supports long-term brand building. If you have an existing fluent device, lean into it with your Christmas advertisement. Or be bold and launch a new mascot or scenario that you’ll make use of for years to come. 

Fantasy

There’s a sense of magic at this time of year. Advertisers that lean into this feeling of wonder can deliver feelings of surprise and happiness, which are the most powerful emotions for driving long-term growth. Morrisons “Farmer Christmas” ad is a strong example of fantasy put into practice. It takes viewers on a wild ride with flying combine harvesters, emotive semi-trucks and magical helpers. For 60 seconds, we’re transported to an enchanted world that’s further strengthened by its likeable characters and cheerful conclusion.

Diversity

One of the great things about the festive season is that it brings everyone together. There are numerous opportunities to celebrate different cultural traditions with family members, friends and colleagues, from Christmas to Hanukkah to Kwanza. Because the communities in which we live are increasingly diverse, it’s important for advertisers to showcase inclusion in ads. This is not just a best practice for end-of-year advertisements, but year-round.

Our Feeling Seen UK and Feeling Seen USA reports demonstrate that ads that bring diversity to the forefront are more effective than the average ad. Audiences want to see themselves reflected on screen. Representation is a great place to start, like Macy’s ad that showcases a young Black girl searching for the perfect present for her dad. Ads that go even further into advocacy and allyship by highlighting the specific experiences of underrepresented groups can also offer impressive results, like Etsy’s ad from 2021.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is an effective element, as it can increase attention among viewers and create greater mental availability, thereby creating fame and growth for brands. How can you achieve a sense of nostalgia and tradition? Set ads in the past or allude to it using costumes, sets and familiar cultural references. In some cases, this nostalgia can be achieved through the use of classic characters, like DFS’ ad featuring Wallace and Gromit, or by scenes clearly planted in the past, like in a 5.1-Star ad for Harry & David that takes us through the decades with recognisable sets, fashions and hairstyles.

On the Naughty List

There are certain approaches that tend to make it more difficult to entertain and engage audiences. These “naughty list” elements include:

The sadness trap

While occasions like Christmas, Hanukkah and Thanksgiving certainly make people feel more generous and nostalgic, both for-profit and non-profit organisations need to walk a fine line when using sadness in advertisements. For example, many non-profits use jarring images to highlight the seriousness of social issues and create a sense of urgency among the public. Sadness can be an effective tool, but brands must work to resolve these feelings for viewers, such as through humorous or hopeful endings. While Toyota’s “Come Home” ad generates feelings of sadness, an uplifting conclusion sees these emotions turn to happiness.

Overwhelming product focus

Featuring products in ads can work. Just take a look at M&S’s Percy Pig ad
from the 2021 festive season. It’s chock full of delicious Christmas pudding, smoked salmon and Panettone. But the products are delightfully sprinkled throughout the story, which sees Percy walking the supermarket aisles after he’s inadvertently brought to life by a fairy.

In comparison, close-up product shots that break the whole into smaller parts are associated with narrow-beam attention and only likely to work for people who are already interested in the category or product. That’s why it’s important to make products part of a larger story that can yield a greater emotional response.

Lacking authenticity

Although many Christmas ads tend to go down the typical fun and indulgent path for their creative, some attempt to align themselves with a mission or initiative to create purpose and goodwill for their brand. This comes at a risk, as viewers tend to place brands’ authenticity under fierce and much-needed scrutiny. This makes it difficult for brands to know how to go about purpose driven advertising without fear of retaliation from viewers questioning their credibility.

Co-Op’s 2021 Christmas ad used a simple and unique execution, familiar feel (a celebrity, Dermot O’Leary, dropping in on a charity) and a charity with a relevant brand fit (Community Fridge to reinforce Co-Op’s associations with community action) to win over viewers and achieve an impressive 4.5-Stars.

Blowing budget on the wrong celebrity

Our database shows that ads including celebrities score, on average, about the same as ads without them, so there is no automatic advantage in leveraging famous faces. Many celebrities command large fees. Additionally, although they can create positive associations and distinctions for brands, they can also bring baggage, and may have many other brand relationships which water down any single brand association. To unlock attention, use celebs who are well-liked by your target audience.

At a solid 3.5-Stars, Boots’ Christmas ad
is pulled together thanks to a great lead performance by Jenna Coleman who successfully creates strong, positive association for the audience, especially for the custom sample of women 35 years and older – it scored 4.7-Stars with this audience. So why didn’t the ad do better among the wider audience? People loved the seasonal vibe and performances but had some wariness around the sheer scale of Coleman’s gift haul – in an era of heightened awareness of waste, it felt too close to overconsumption for some. Overall, the Boots ad achieves its main aim – to re-energise the brand’s core customers with a touch of magic, but this example highlights that even a well-casted celebrity is not immune to public scrutiny and still has capacity to underperform.

The Gift of a Great Ad

The festive season is a special time for brands. Consumers are eagerly shopping for the latest products to gift to friends, family members and themselves. Big-ticket items and showy displays that might seem frivolous at other points throughout the year are fair game in the name of merry magic.

Yet this time of year is also stressful for advertisers. Because these ads typically have big budgets, there is a significant amount of pressure for them to deliver an end-of-year boost to the bottom line. By following the above dos and don’ts, both brands and agencies have a clear recipe for cooking up creative that entertains viewers and encourages them to open their wallets.

To test your early-stage ad concept, animatic or finished film, sign up for Test Your Ad today. Our reports share insightful metrics that reveal the long-term brand building and short-term sales activation potential of your creative to guide your team.